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Cool! Finished SD recently but still have an itch for more. I would've bought Nightmare in North Point if it hadn't looked so stupid and gotten such mediocre reviews. This new DLC looks more like my thing. :)

Cool! Finished SD recently but still have an itch for more. I would've bought Nightmare in North Point if it hadn't looked so stupid and gotten such mediocre reviews. This new DLC looks more like my thing. :)

It's actually not bad. Your face meter gets replaced with what I call "dragon ball z" meter, where by when you fill it up your fists go on fire. If you don't want it full price I'd suggest it at a sale.

I'm looking forward to this one, they've all been great fun so far.

"Halo is designed to make the player think "I look like that, I am macho sitting in my undies with my xbox""

Yeah. I've gotten all the SLeeping Dogs DLC during various sales. I really enjoyed the game (even if I feel it had some pretty bad padding in terms of driving and that the gameplay didn't advance beyond what was covered in the tutorial) and look forward to more, but haven't been in the right mood to conquer the DLCs just yet. So I'll grab this on sale whenever.

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

What sets it apart from a GTA-a-like with melee, or does it just do that very well?

There isn't really any stand-out feature to Sleeping Dogs if that's what you mean. Everything it does has been done before. It's simply a well-made game. The story and the characters are interesting. The driving, shooting, and world exploration are all fun. But best of all is the hand-to-hand combat. I thought it would be like the Batman games but it turned out to be more challenging and complex that those. At times it feels like Oni, which is my fave beat-em up ever.

Originally Posted by Jesus_Phish

If you don't want it full price I'd suggest it at a sale.

Alas, I got it on the XBox. The Marketplace isn't as generous with it's sales as Steam is. :/ Might still get Year of the Snake if the word of mouth turns out to be good. Zodiac Tournament looks like a hoot as well. :D

My overall thought on Year of the Snake: It feels a lot more like the True Crime franchise that Sleeping Dogs came from than the game proper or the rest of the DLC does, but somehow - somehow - that's not a bad thing.

I was, however, a little disappointed that arresting people doesn't seem to do anything beyond adding an additional way to take an enemy down. I was kind of hoping the DLC would react differently depending on whether you did mostly arrests or were more violent (even in the simplistic way True Crime did), but maybe that was expecting too much from a £5 DLC. The story was a little weak in presentation, which is a shame because it was a decent story; just presented badly. Overall, though, I liked it.

Originally Posted by dsch

I didn't know Sleeping Dogs was so popular. What sets it apart from a GTA-a-like with melee, or does it just do that very well?

I'll just copy and paste my Steam recommendation:-

It's too easy to superficially look at Sleeping Dogs and dismiss it as a GTA-clone, which is a shame, because Sleeping Dogs is something quite special. In fact, it's more like Red Dead Redemption, in that it is a fascinating study in how games can learn the *right* things from film without succumbing to the common malady of film-envy that's responsible for so many poor games. Yes, the mechanics are familiar, but their implementation supports the story-genre far more than any arbitrary gaming paradigm. This is first and foremost a Hong Kong Cinema game, and any similarity to open-world third-person action games is more a matter of convenience than what the game's really about.

I didn't know Sleeping Dogs was so popular. What sets it apart from a GTA-a-like with melee, or does it just do that very well?

I don't care much for GTA 4, but I liked Sleeping Dogs.

The story and setting are better. The melee combat is much more fun than GTA 4's guns, particularly the environment kills. The driving is much much better and more fun, particularly the motorcycles (my favorite in Sleeping Dogs, unusable in GTA). Sleeping Dogs doesn't sacrifice fun for realism, so you have Assassin's Creed style running, Just Cause style vehicle hijacks, and a bit of Max Payne bullet-time style lunges.

Perhaps most importantly, GTA 4 loves to waste your time, while Sleeping Dogs doesn't. The friends that constantly pester you for boring dates are replaced with individual date missions that are actually fun. When failing a mission, GTA forces you to waste 5-10 min driving from the mission acceptance point to the arms dealer for a bullet proof vest and then to the mission start point. Sleeping Dogs has a convenient check point at the start of the mission, and through out the missions.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sleeping Dogs and I'd recommend playing it. Ragnar's right - GTA4 went out of its way to annoy you (even San Andreas did to some extent, with the whole "eat right and exercise or get fat" thing), while Sleeping Dogs gets out of your way and lets you have fun. It's doing nothing that other games haven't done, breaking no new ground, but who doesn't want a competently-made, polished, GTA clone with a non-terrible plot and decent, chunky feeling melee combat?